abandonware games sorted by popularity

Ever wanted to get chess lessons from a genius who could crush your soul with a bishop and a glare? Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess (1994, DOS) is your chance. Based on the classic boo...

MicroProse Soccer is an abandoned action-oriented soccer game, developed by Sensible Software and released by MicroProse Software in 1988. The appeal of MicroProse Soccer was its s...

In Dark Designs 1: Grelminar’s Staff, you’re thrust into a classic fantasy dungeon crawler with an emphasis on text-driven menus and turn-based combat. It’s like ...

Star General is a turn-based strategy game developed by Catware and published by SSI (Strategic Simulations, Inc.). It was released in 1996 for MS-DOS and later for Windows. The ga...

In Contraption Zack, you play as a kid with more mechanical gadgets than common sense. Your job? Fix a series of increasingly absurd machines in a puzzle platformer that’s eq...

From 1987’s text adventure golden age, The Lurking Horror proves you don’t need graphics to be terrified. You’re a student trapped on a snowy university campus du...

When Die Hard 2: Die Harder hit DOS in 1992, it decided the airport setting meant “time for an on-rails shooter.” Picture John McClane glued to a track, blasting bad gu...

In Crime and Punishment, you’re not the criminal—you’re the detective, judge, and executioner rolled into one. Presented as a legal simulation, it tasks you with ...

Back in 1989, David Wolf: Secret Agent tried really hard to make you feel like James Bond. You get car chases, fistfights, and enough cheesy dialogue to fill an action movie marath...

Dungeon Explorer takes the term “dungeon” very seriously—there’s a lot of it, and not much else. Released in 1990, this top-down adventure is part RPG, part...

If you thought Norse mythology needed more monochrome graphics, Caves of Thor (1989) has you covered. It’s an early Apogee game, meaning it’s tough, quirky, and uses le...

In Diggers 2: Extractors, released in 1995, the digging franchise doubled down on strategy while adding a dash of science fiction flair. This time, your miners aren’t just bu...

Imagine a game where minesweeper meets viral chaos—Chain Reaction (1996) isn’t quite that, but it is a fast-paced puzzle-action hybrid where things blow up in neat litt...

Normality is a first-person adventure video game developed by Gremlin Interactive and released in 1996. The game is set in a dystopian future where a totalitarian regime known as t...

F29 Retaliator is what happens when a flight simulator decides it wants to be a blockbuster action movie. You’re piloting a fictional next-generation stealth fighter through ...

Ever wanted to read Car and Driver magazine and then actually drive the cars featured in it? Well, someone in 1992 said “why not both?” and Car and Driver the game was ...

A Dudley Dilemma (1988) sounds like the title of a children’s book, but it’s actually a very British text adventure for DOS where the stakes are politely quirky and mil...